


When the waters rise

by vtn



Category: Seattle Kraken "A Legend from the Deep Awakens" (Promotional Video)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:40:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27548467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vtn/pseuds/vtn
Summary: "Now, no one knows anymore how to call up the Kraken. But they say that when they do, the sky in the morning turns yellow-green, like a cat's eye, like an old bruise. And if you see a sky that color, you better stay far from the shore, and bring in your traps right away, because when the waters rise and the Kraken comes he brings a storm like no other."A crabber. A tourist. An architect. A CEO. A researcher. And a legend from the deep.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 12
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	When the waters rise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plastics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plastics/gifts).



> This story demanded to be written the moment I saw your prompts and watched the promotional video. I'm not from Seattle, but I've been traveling there to visit family and friends since I was little, and I love the city so much, from visiting the troll under the bridge to getting lost in the halls of the Library to buying funky knicknacks at the Archie McPhee store to snacking from the weird hot dog carts that slice the hot dogs in half and put cream cheese on top and drinking wayyyyy too many lattes. I think this gorgeous city is well overdue for a legendary cryptid of its own.
> 
> Also I don't think I ever expected to write RPF about Frank Gehry, but that's Yuletide for you!

**Marine Area 10, 8:00 am**

"Kyle, you better haul those cages in fast. There's a storm coming in!" shouts Freddy. He's glad his nephew is working in the family crabbing business, but wishes the kid could learn a little faster. Ah, well, Freddy himself was probably like that in the old days, struggling to keep up with Dad and Grandpa.

"A storm?" Kyle shakes his shaggy mane of hair out of his eyes, scans the horizon. "It's a beautiful day, Uncle Freddy." It has been, or at least the kind of overcast day that passes for a good one this time of year in Seattle. So far.

There's no time to explain. "I said haul those cages, boy!" Freddy turns to the cages he's pulling up, fat crabs clinging to their sides. He has to work fast, and that means no distractions.

And besides, if he was going to explain to Kyle, what would he say? That he feels it in his bones? It's not even that--it's the color of the sky at sunrise this morning. That yellow, almost green color. It's the color of the sky in that story Grandpa used to tell. Freddy remembers it all too well, huddling around the space heater at Grandpa's house with his sister Jo and all their cousins after a long day out on the Sound, all of them soaking wet and stinking of salt and brine. The lamplight throwing strange shadows on Grandpa's face as he told them about the legend of the Seattle Kraken. 

_"Now that was a beast the greatest fishermen on the West Coast would love to claim," Grandpa would say, "but no man could claim him. He's a great beast the size of a whole city block. No, five city blocks. With the fish hooks and the spears, hundreds of them, sticking out of his back from the men who tried to hunt him, the men who called him up from the deep to try to take their prize."_

_"And the women!" Jo would always pipe up, indignantly._

_"Oh yes, the women. In fact, it was a woman got closest. Old Sally McCoy. Stuck her spear right in his great old eye, she did. They say the beast still dreams about her._

_"Now, no one knows anymore how to call up the Kraken. But they say that when they do, the sky in the morning turns yellow-green, like a cat's eye, like an old bruise. And if you see a sky that color, you better stay far from the shore, and bring in your traps right away, because when the waters rise and the Kraken comes he brings a storm like no other."_

And as Freddy looks to the horizon, he can see it. The clouds starting to gather and build, their undersides black like the Sound. A storm like no other, indeed.

\---

**Ballard Canal Locks and Fish Ladder, 10:00 am**

Amal can't stop staring at the salmon. Her face is pressed up close to the glass so she can see them shimmying, their scales throwing rainbows in every direction. 

"Look at them, Mama," she says, trying to get her mother's attention. Her mother is distracted, doing something with her baby brother's stroller while the twins clutch at her shirt and beg for snacks. 

"They're very nice," Amal's mother says. She isn't even looking. Amal sighs, and keeps watching the salmon. A big one swims by, its powerful fins propelling it upstream. Then two smaller ones, quick and silvery in the teal water. 

But something is strange. 

Amal read the signs around the room. She's only seven, but she's a good reader. She tries to read everything she can. And she read about how the fish ladder works. It has 21 steps and helps make it easier for the fish to swim upstream, helping them cross the canal locks and make their way back home.

So the strange thing is that the fish are not swimming upstream--they're going the other way. And there are more and more of them now, throwing reflections around the viewing room. 

" _Look_ at them, Mama," Amal says, more insistently now. The salmon crowd and cluster, big groups of them swimming into the space behind the glass. She walks back over so she can tug on her mother's hand. Her mother finally turns around to look at the salmon. So does Amal. In fact, everyone in the viewing room is looking now, pulling out their smartphones to take photos and videos, their murmuring growing louder.

Here's what Amal sees: there are many more salmon now. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, their shimmering bodies filling the tank. And they aren't moving randomly anymore. They've come together in a school, and they're forming a shape. Amal is a good reader. She learned her English alphabet when she was three, the same time she learned Arabic. So she knows this symbol all too well: it's a letter S.

S as in salmon. S as in Seattle. S as in _something is coming_.

\---

**Los Angeles, California (also: Seattle Center), 12 noon**

Frank is sitting in his living room when he gets the text message. He's in the middle of contemplating taking his boat out on the marina. There's a good wind today and a sunny sky--the perfect day for a little sailing jaunt on the _Foggy_ , no one and nothing to disturb him but the cries of seagulls and the rhythm of the waves. He glances at his phone screen and grimaces. It's from Samuel: _Dad, you had better turn on the news right now._

Sailing will have to wait, then. Frank sighs and flips on the TV, surfing to the first news channel he can find. Aha! The picture is showing one of his designs. The Experience Music Project in Seattle, looks like. Is someone criticizing it again? Frank has been around long enough to accept that his work will always be polarizing, if it's the EMP he gets it. Whatever you say about his creative process--though he's never told anyone--the EMP was a different story. 

It started with a dream. A recurring dream, one that woke him up shivering in the middle of the night. He couldn't get it out of his head, and he can still picture it clearly now. The water rising, and the building floating up, up, up on the waves. The dimensions of it crowding into his head unbidden, the exact shapes and angles to make it float as clear in his head as if he'd spent weeks calculating them. He kept disturbing poor Berta in the middle of the night as he scribbled them down.

Now, Frank squints at the TV screen.

Sure enough, Seattle Center is underwater. The waves lap at the edges of the building as the museum visitors scramble to the exits. Frank watches as the waters continue to rise, his dream playing out in front of his eyes. There's a wrenching sound, and then...the Experience Music Project moves. It rocks gently and floats up, rising with the waves. The tourists are calming down now, safe inside their ark. And the sound it makes now as the wind whips through its towers and curves...well...it almost sounds like music.

\---

**Offices of a small ersatz Seattle touring company, Belltown, 3:00 pm**

Cat watches the rain fall down with considerable interest, her fifth cup of coffee of the day in her left hand. With her right hand, she reaches for the stack of papers at the end of her desk, keeping her eyes on the window as she searches for the map by feel. Ah, there it is. 

She shoves everything else off her desk onto the floor, making Sujeong the intern jump about an inch in the air. Cat glances wryly over at Sujeong's desk, which is neatly organized, the only ornaments a stack of notebooks with color-coded tabs and a tiny snowglobe of Mt. Rainier.

Back to the map. "Sujeong, come over here," Cat calls. She sees Sujeong grimace as she eyes the coffee stain on top of Pike Place Market. "Help me circle all the new sections." The two of them straighten themselves up and get right to business. Pike Place is a good place to start, actually--specifically, the bottom two levels. The tourists will love watching the fish through the windows. Ballard--the salmon are still doing all kinds of who-knows-what, so they'll go for that too. 

"The troll!" says Sujeong breathlessly. She draws a bold--and perfectly round--circle over Fremont. That's right: the troll is underwater now too. It will look perfect with a growth of barnacles and anemones.

What else: the Library is still mostly above ground, but the view from the higher levels has gone from 'worthwhile' to 'unmissable' so Cat will see if she can get access for her tour groups. 

By the end of the hour, the map is marked up with so many circles it looks like Swiss cheese. Sujeong has also traced, in blue ink, the parts of the city that are currently flooded. Green ink is a likely flooding candidate. Purple ink is the existing Lost Seattle Tours tour route. On that note, Cat will probably have to add at least one more route to the tour. Probably two or three, or four. A different tour for each neighborhood!

It's been six months since they asked her to head up Lost Seattle Tours, and though she was equal parts qualified and enthusiastic, Cat always had a sinking feeling about the job that she pushed to the back of her brain and tried to ignore. It's like, the whole glass cliff thing, right? Pick the Black girl to run the show only when things are looking bad, and give yourself an easy scapegoat when they inevitably collapse into a heap like all the stacks of paper now on the floor next to Cat's desk.

Well, the sinking feeling is gone, now. Because now, with this flood, with all of the extra tour routes? She glances out the window. The waters are rising even faster than her spirits. Seattle Underground? Ha! Get ready for Seattle Under _water_.

In the short term, though: it's closing time, and Sujeong, priceless gem that she is, is still an intern, and as Lost Seattle Tours is no Seattle Underground (yet) there's no budget for overtime. "All right, time to go home," Cat says, attempting to fold up the map. Is it horizontal first, then vertical? Or does it go in thirds, starting from the top--

Sujeong gently, beatifically lifts the map and folds it into a perfect, flat little parcel within seconds, too fast for Cat to even figure out how she did it. Then she extracts a plastic baggie from a drawer in her desk and slides the map into the baggie, folding it up to get all the air out before she zips it shut. "For waterproofing," she murmurs. Then she opens a different drawer in her desk, and pauses. "Do you have a way of getting home, Catherine?" 

"I guess not." Cat hadn't really planned ahead for the whole floodwater thing. 

Sujeong reaches back into the drawer and pulls out a rectangular package folded as neatly as the map. "Well, if you don't mind the company…" She also pulls a pump out of the drawer. "We can take my kayak!"

"You have a kayak in your desk." Cat phrases it more as a statement than a question, because of course.

"The job description said _Other duties, as assigned_ , didn't it?" Sujeong shrugs. "Let's go, then," and they set off into the brand new map that is unfolding now before them.

\---

**The Seattle Room, Seattle Central Library, 5:30 pm**

Speaking of the Library:

Max is in the Seattle Room, as usual, when the rain starts. She doesn't even notice it, because, well, she's lived here all her life. It's not exactly like you notice rain in Seattle. 

She's been spending her nights in this room for a long time too. First as a way to escape home after her grandmother died, then as a way to escape work and the customers who shouted at her for taking more than 30 seconds to serve their pourover, who got angry with her because they ordered a _medium_ cortado, not this tiny cup!

But now it's something more. Now it's a project. It started with finding a reference for her grandmother's old Salish stories that she half-remembered. Then she cross-referenced it to sea shanties from crabbers on the Sound. And then in one of the art books she found a drawing by a Denny Party member that showed a many-tentacled creature among other sketches of local sea life. Today she's been making notes of anomalous radar recordings off the coast of Whidbey Island.

A hush falls over the Seattle Room. The rain has stopped. Max glances out the window. A thick fog settles over the rooftop and curls around the skyscrapers, casting everything in an eerie yellow-green glow.

Well, it's almost closing time. Max packs her backpack and tosses it over her shoulder, heads down the winding stairs until she reaches the ground floor. Which...is no longer the ground floor.

Her grandmother's legends--

The seamen's verses--

The naturalists' sketches--

The mysterious recordings--

...all jumble and cluster in her head. A slow thrill climbs its way up her body. She stops to think for just a moment longer, and then races to the main floor, which is now the ground floor, and leaves the door swinging behind her. She runs to the edge of the waters. She stretches out her arms. She looks to the fog-swathed sky. 

"Seattle Kraken," she shouts, "I call thee forth!"

Nothing happens for a moment. And then another moment passes, and the waters stir. Max looks down as a little whirlpool seems to form in front of her, bubbles come up to the surface, and...the surface breaks. 

A single tentacle rises up from the depths. But it's not just a tentacle. It's holding something. It's holding…

...a hockey stick?

As she stands there, puzzling it over, the tentacle shakes the stick at her insistently, almost like it's trying to tell her something. 

Max reaches out her arm. Extends her hand. Grabs the stick, and holds.


End file.
